That’s my next project to get things from Google/Apple.
The options I’ve seen so far
- Immich: great if you can self-host, but I prefer not to, so that’s out for me
- Nextcloud on a VPS (Hetzner or others): you need E2EE to prevent the providers from seeing your photos, but then all the apps like Memories etc don’t work ( https://help.nextcloud.com/t/end-to-end-encryption-nextcloud/237705/3 )
- Ente: has E2EE embedded, the face recognition happens on the clients. Can be self-hostable, so that gives more trust that other providers can launch their own European instances in the future.
- https://zeitkapsl.eu/en/ : has E2EE, but no self hostable option, so you kind of have to trust them that they implement their design (which is actually kind of nice: https://zeitkapsl.eu/en/e2ee-architecture/ . They have a security audit on their roadmap (announced 8 days ago: https://zeitkapsl.featurebase.app/en/p/formal-security-audit )
Any option I am missing?
If you host Immich on a VPS, there are three scenarios
What? Disk encryption is definitely “allowed”, and yes, that is how you should do it. It’s not “cumbersome” either, most installers have a GUI for that, and if Hetzner offers preconfigured images, full disk encryption is probably one of the offers.
I am now convinced that you are a little overwhelmed by the thought of managing a VPS. That is totally OK! But don’t go talking out your ass because of it.
I was answering based on this thread ( https://old.reddit.com/r/hetzner/comments/1hi6ktq/how_to_use_encrypted_rootfs_on_cloud_instancesvps/ ) with the following steps
The definition of “cumbersome” will vary from person to person.
Indeed, that’s why I want to avoid to self host in the first place.
Not sure about the “talking out of my ass” part.
LUKS isn’t cumbersome, you should really enable it on nearly every Linux system.
Anyways, what do you mean “allowed”?
I have a Hetzner root server set up this way btw, have to ssh in to decrypt the zfs pool before boot.
Do note though, this does not protect from an attacker with physical access reading memory.
I use LUKS on my personal machines, I’m just not sure if I want to enable it for a VPS. Now if you tell me you’re doing that without any issue, that’s good to know.
So in this case, the VPS provider can still access your photos when they are being used by the photos management software?
Seems to be another argument for E2EE embedded photos software.
I mean… Depends on your threat model. Hetzner is a very reputable German hoster. The only way someone is going to try and read and puzzle together memory dumps is if you’re under investigation for something seriously heinous.
Shutting the VPS down also solves this.
But really, this is a general problem with every “someone else’s computer” solution.
E2EE still nice though, wish Immich had it.
I see. Thanks. E2EE would indeed be nice, but the Immich devs have made it clear for a long time that it woudn’t work due to the way Immich has been developed.